Off the Mark

Back in March I wrote a longish post about “My personal journey into ebooks.” Things have since changed so I feel that I ought to add some commentary to those thoughts.

As a caveat, these comments only pertain to me, at least as intended. They may apply to you as an individual reader but I do not intend for them to be generalized.

I have for all intents and purposes currently quit reading ebooks on my Touch. None of the issues I mentioned in the original post are the issue though. Simply put …

I came to the realization that the circumstances in which I was using my Touch to read books were not good circumstances in which to do so. Other than as stated in my previous post, and to no greater extent, there are no interface issues that have brought about this change.

Context: I was reading books on my Touch during bus rides to and from campus, waiting for the bus at the end of the day, and at lunch. My bus rides are about 10 minutes long and my average and usual bus wait is 10 minutes.

Trying to read while watching for the correct bus or the correct stop does not make for quality reading. Perhaps if I had a longer bus ride reading on the bus would be better. But I don’t. So I quit.

[I have also not been reading much in the way of print lately either but for other reasons. I am trying to get back in the swing since between all the other things I have going on I do need to "relax" and sustained reading is good for that.]

Today I did start reading from my Touch again at lunch (The Importance of Being Earnest). Lunch is a longer sustained period than the bus waiting/riding and it is easier to choose my stopping point so retention is greatly improved. Also, truth be told, it is easier to read from the Touch at lunch than a print book. It lays flat and stays open with no problems. If I need to eat with my fingers it becomes a small problem but I eat at a place where I need a fork (or chopsticks) most days of the week.

I have no aversion to reading on my Touch at home if need be and I will on occasion. But then I also have several 100s of print books here that need reading (A very conservative estimate).

I did read several more books than those mentioned in my earlier post before I quit using the Touch to do so. Assuming I can find more sources of free books for the Touch I imagine I will continue to use it for reading at times where I can have a semi-sustained reading experience but it is inconvenient to carry a print book.

So I guess the main point is I realized that the situations in which I was trying to read ebooks were generally not good for reading for me.  It was the situations and not ebooks or the Touch itself that caused me to quit. I will just have to see where it goes from here.

I am at The Ethics of Information Organization conference in Milwaukee for the next two days and I am really looking forward to the presentations.

Hopefully I will find time to blog about this soon; unlike so many other things. With any luck the conference site will have wireless available. It is in the public library. If so, and I can find power, then I may be tweeting it with the hash tag #EIO09. Update: Seems they want #IOETHICS

More importantly, though, I hope to learn a lot and be given lots to think about.

Last Tuesday morning my facebook status said:

one year ago tonight. it began in an alley. i love you more than i knew was even possible. ♥

I was sending a personal message as I am wont to do and dropping a hint or two.

Tuesday was S and my pre-anniverary. One year previous she had joined me for my then usual Monday eve at Crane Alley.  We had dinner and drinks and talked. For five and a half hours.

Our official 1st anniversary is today but as that evening was so very important to me I wanted to commemorate it. I began the below poem on the 8th and did a bit more work on it on the 9th or 10th and some final minor tweaking on Tuesday.

We had a “super secret date” scheduled for Tuesday evening although I figured S would surely know what I had planned. Whenever she has asked me to secret dates I have been completely surprised. Yet, she didn’t know. Now I’m not claiming it was much—though it was appropriate—as we simply had dinner and drinks. In an Alley.

It Began In An Alley

a short, long, year ago
on a lovely night in May
a premonition of the future
sat with me for a while
in an Alley.

talking, commiserating, we spent hours
laughing, learning, longing
unknown to both
this was simply a prelude
to the loving.

which began
in an alley.

Happy anniversary, my love. May there be many, many more.

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can see your soul

out of sight,
your deep dark secrets
ebb and flow like the tide
but all that i see
are infinite spectrums of possibility

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can reach your soul

i love the infinite distances
that exist between us.
with persistence, our reach
will be enough.

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can touch your soul

guardians of each other’s solitude,
sheltering, yet giving wing,
we are free to take flight in
that beautiful touch of the other
“whole and before an immense sky.”

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can feel your soul

from the inexpressible unity of
life death, heaven earth, you me
rises this delicious nourishing love
giving the flowers strength,
setting us both ablaze, eternally.

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can see your soul
sometimes …

§

Thanks to James and Rilke for the inspiration, motif, and some of the words.

·

James - “Sometimes” from Laid [WorldCat entry].

·

Sometime prior to October of last year, I was inspired to begin a series of poems that were inspired by one or more lines from songs. This is the 1st one to be completed.

The 1st stanza is pretty much all me, while the rest are based on the letters of Rilke. Much of the Rilke material comes from a section of a letter that (in one translation) begins:

In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude … (36).

Most places on the Internet cite this (if they cite it at all) as coming from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. That is simply not true. Perhaps as (one of) his best known prose work it just gets the nod, but it is from the above collection and is from a letter dated August 17, 1901 to Emanuel von Bodman.

There is another translation also on the Internet which is what sent me after this in the first place. It was quite a bit of work to finally track this down, and I had the assistance of another librarian to do so. Some day I may write a lengthy post on these kinds of issues [I certainly had meant to long before now].

The Internet served me well in turning me on to the wonderful sentiments expressed by Rilke. And then it proceeded to routinely deceive me as to the source of said sentiments.  The Internet can be a wonderful thing. It can also be horrible in that people (knowingly or not) lie.

Through it all I just keep trying to string a few words together.

Recently I began reading ebooks. Before I address which books specifically and related issues let me put a few things on the table.

Preliminaries:

This post is about my experiences in the recent present and not about the future of what will or might be (even if I comment on that).

I have read quite a fair number of lengthy things from desktop computer CRTs, a flat panel display, and on both my 12″ Mac PowerBook and my 13″ MacBook. I read quite a few PDFs and lengthy web pages that I did not want to print out for whatever reason, many of them from the PowerBook, back in the day when I was reading heavily in our field and writing about it here.

Several years ago I bought a PDF ebook on some computer topic from the Woody’s Watch email newsletter folks. Maybe I read it, maybe I used it as a reference book. Can’t say as I remember.

Last summer via rebate I got a 16GB iPod Touch for free when I bought the MacBook. Until recently, though, I hadn’t used it much at all. I loaned it to a friend to take to ALA Midwinter and she tested out a few apps and also discovered that our campus IT folks had finally made an “app” available that connects one to the campus network whenever you are in range.

The insta-connection made a huge difference in my willingness to use it. The other thing that made me start using it more is the app Stanza.

Stanza is a very useful app, although not perfect (more about this in a moment). I still have a paper-based book in my backpack for reading on the bus and/or at lunch, but I find that it has been remaining in the backpack more and more as I grab the Touch and go (lunch). Part of this is that I have a new winter coat and I do not have a nice big pocket to put a book in anymore. Part of it is something(s) else.

In some ways the Touch is more convenient. It certainly lies flat better than most books. It is lighter than most every book. But it also has drawbacks. No. 1 is that a large number of things I want to read are not available for the Touch, either due to format issues or period. No. 2 is that I have a ton of print things I do want to read and am not about to pay again for an ebook version, assuming one is available. And, yes, I do imagine that over time availability will change. [Note: Amazon's recent Kindle app for the Touch/iPhone will do little to make the books I want to read available any time soon, if ever.]

I am aware that if I used Google Books then I might find even more available than I think are, but until the scanning/OCR process is greatly improved No Thank You! I used to do electronic reserves work and while this work is valuable in assorted ways I hated reading even the quality work we produced. [UIUC still has a massive way to go in this arena and could learn from what we were doing.] Thus, I’m not about to routinely try reading Google Books books on my Touch. Also, I believe that requires a network connection. Sustained reading on my Touch should not require a network connection except for the occasional acquisition.

I still greatly value production value in my content, be it editorial work, text layout, or the many other qualities that go into a quality reading experience (in any medium). [See for example, Mandy Brown's In Defense of Readers at A List Apart.]

On that note, on to issues of

Formatting:

So far, I have read one purchased book and a couple free ones from assorted sources. The purchased one had the worst formatting in Stanza.

The purchased book was The Lust Chronicles from Ravenous Romance. Ravenous Romance publishes only ebooks and audiobooks and they are quite affordable [$1.99 for short stories, $4.99 for ebooks, $12.99 for audiobooks]. Their ebooks come in multiple formats and for one price you can download any and every format you need. Your purchase price allows you to download the book up to 50 times over a 50-day period. Not sure why these are the terms but they are certainly liberal.

I initially got the .epub format which they say is for Stanza. Could not make it work on either my laptop or the Touch, nor could we get it to work on S’s laptop or Touch [1st & 2nd gen Touchs, respectively]. After futzing around in the FAQs at both Ravenous Romance and Lexcycle I gave up and grabbed the PDF.

The PDF looks exquisite on the laptop either in Adobe Acrobat or in Stanza. But. It is completely wonky on the Touch. It is readable, but it is distracting. The table of contents is run together as one long paragraph instead of as a list. The formatting of the individual story titles and authors, and all white space between chapters, is thrown out and thus the stories are all kind of run together. I guess for $4.99 I cannot complain too much but it was a distraction during reading.

Turns out this is what Stanza does with PDFs, thus I have started using PDF Annotater on the Touch for PDFs. It provides annotation capabilities and allows one to read PDFs with graphics. This purchased pdf looks exquisite in PDF Annotater on the Touch.

The other books I have read are:

E. A. Poe, “Bon-Bon” (1832) (short story) from www.feedbooks.com. The formatting on this one isn’t too bad. Default format is fully justified which I do not like when the justifier is not good, or, as in the case of the Touch screen, the “page” size is small. I just turned off the full justification and, although the right margin is even more ragged than normal in ragged right justification, I do like it better.

Paragraph breaks exist but new paragraphs are indented a whole 1 space. Not much, but now that I left justified the text it is generally enough. With the text fully justified over to the right margin one space was not enough. All-in-all, the formatting of this short story is not bad, especially with the changes I just made.

D. H. Lawrence, Amores: Peoms (1916) New York : B. W. Huebsch (E-text prepared by Lewis Jones) www.blackmask.com [2007 Blackmask Online / Munsey's Magazine]

[Seems blackmask is now Munseys and will redirect you to http://www.munseys.com/.]

This text seems to be formatted fine but I have some concerns. Being a neophyte reader of poetry I am still trying to get a grasp of “the art of the poetic line” and the narrow screen width plays havoc with such.

Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing. Great prose might be filled with metaphors. The rhythmic vitality of prose might be so intense that it rises to moments of regularity we can scan. Its diction may be more sensuous, more evocative, than that of many poems. We wouldn’t be attracted to the notion of prose poetry if it didn’t feel exciting to abandon the decorum of lines (Preface, xi).

Longenbach, James. 2008. The Art of the Poetic Line. Art of series. Saint Paul, Minn: Graywolf.

Sure, I can rotate the Touch and get a wider line length but then am required to move forward (or backward) through more “pages.” And this forces more stanzas to be broken across pages so that the next step in poetic semantics from the line to the stanza is also seriously affected.

I’m not saying that this is a non-starter or that it is an issue for more practiced readers of poetry but it is a concern to me.

Christina Rosetti, Poems (1906) Boston : Little, Brown and Co. / Author’s edition, revised and enlarged 1876, University Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. Produced by Steven desJardins, Jeffrey Online Distributed Proofreading Team. www.blackmask.com [2007 Blackmask Online / Munsey's Magazine]

Pretty much the same issues (for me) as Lawrence. Also, there are an awful lot of poems in this text so navigation by bookmarks (where every poem is a bookmark) involves a lot of scrolling.

For another perspective, “why is text on screens so ugly?,” see the post at if:book re hyphenation (or lack thereof) in e-texts.

Page navigation:

For this issue, I am not sure whether it is the Touch or Stanza. Page navigation is accomplished by touching the right side of the screen to move forward, and the left side to move backward. Sometimes the pages go the opposite way from which you are touching it to do so. Generally it isn’t too big of a deal but it is a pain when reading poetry. It is a massive deal when one is trying to read poetry aloud in an attempt to cheer up someone special. My Touch got tossed across the room the other evening when it did this several times in a row to me. Not that my getting upset helped the situation at all. Thankfully it didn’t hurt it, either (the situation or the Touch).

Metadata and citation issues:

I am a cataloger. But even before that I have lived a lifetime with “bibliographic” data and issues of citation, be they in person (oral), in writing, or on the web. [OK, the last one hasn't been a lifetime, but you get the point.]

I have been listing my albums (LPs) in assorted documents since I was about 14. Shortly after that came the books, the cassette tapes, the CDs, DVDs, journal articles, ….  Once upon a time, I practically made a living of testing assorted free- and shareware database software for cataloging one’s collections. Metadata is almost always important to me. Often I even exert the effort to control and harness it.

The web and its promises—the Semantic Web, linked data, whatever you want to call what we might one day have, and what we could even have today—give these efforts even more importance. I am not claiming we need a full-fledged librarian version of authority control for the web, but things must be what they purport to be and when that purporting comes from another linked resource then it is even more critical that the purporting be correct and not subject to change in some fundamental way that invalidates the claim.

Also, this data must be fully and easily shareable, despite the recent objections of one of LibraryLand’s overlords.

Bussel, ed. The Lust Chronicles at Ravenous Romance - This page does a decent job of giving me some useful metadata. I get a title, an ISBN, and a publication date (to the exact day). I’m less pleased by the attribution statement; “by Rachel Kramer Bussel” is true in a loose interpretation of “by” but not in the more bibliographic sense. RKB is the editor (and compiler) of this collection of  edited, slightly reworked, blog posts.  But at least the “by” name is linked so that we can easily see what else this “author” is responsible for from this publisher.

My biggest gripe with this page (and the publisher) is that they provide no machine-readable data for Zotero (or similar programs) to pick up. Sure, I can bring that page in as a web page in Zotero but then I get minimal data about the page itself and not about the book. So much then has to be manually changed (including type of resource) that it’s almost easier to just do it by hand in the first place.

At least the human-readable data on the page is describing the book itself.

Poe. “Bon-Bon” at feedbooks.com. Pretty much the same issues as above. No machine-readable metadata supplied. Pulling into Zotero as a web page serves little purpose due to the low amount of data, most of which needs some massaging. No ISBN.

Lawrence. Amores at munseys.com.  OK, here is where I start to lose it. There is all kinds of neat data here for “this” book. Except it isn’t. The data is purportedly brought in from LibraryThing and it is for … wait. Wait for it. The title and author are correct. But all that other neat data (Blurbers, awards and honors, epigraph, last words, people/characters, canonical title, …) is for Like Water for Chocolate. You know, that might be a good book. It might even be great. But it is not Lawrence’s Amores. I guess we’re actually lucky we can’t pull in all that bullshit data automatically.

Rossetti. Poems at munseys.com.  My first gripe is that this book on a cover internal to the file claims to be New Poems by Christina Rosetti: Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected. So what is the title? Other than that, it has the same issues as Lawrence’s Amores, except this one claims, via data also pulled from LibraryThing, to be The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

So much for linked data and/or what things purport themselves to be.

The following comments (this section) only apply to the freely available, public domain books that I’ve been reading and/or looking at.

When you browse these books at sites like munseys.com and feedbooks.com you are generally not seeing the covers that belong to the version of the text that you are acquiring/browsing. feedbooks.com looks to (possibly) be better about having the cover art that goes with their books, but munseys.com most certainly does not. The text of these books is not from the Norton Critical or Penguin editions, for instance.

Many would argue that this is a benefit of freely available cover art. I disagree. Maybe I’m just too old—a dinosaur from another age—but I feel that these visual clues are important to knowing just which text I am dealing with. This misdirection is not the slightest bit useful to me. In fact, I consider it a serious problem and would rather just see a generic cover like those available in LibraryThing [example from my library]. [Hmmm. Interesting. At munseys.com (web version) they don't show cover art. I only see them when browsing from the Touch.]

I mean c’mon. I’m browsing books on my Touch. How useful can a “cover image” thumbnail even be? Ah well; I know people will disagree. If these covers work for them then great. I consider it a disservice. At best.

Which leads to the next question regarding these books?

Which edition am I reading? [I'll ignore FRBR to avoid the wholly unresolved issues surrounding Expressions, Manifestations, and Items in the electronic world.] But in the old school world of print books, using languge that is at least nearing  a couple centuries now, which edition am I looking at? Despite the lie of the cover art, I am pretty well convinced that I do not have the text of, say, the Penguin Classic edition.

Maybe I just need to get with the new world order of no authority and information that is totally free. I.e, information that is totally disconnected from its cultural and historical contexts. I may only be reading a novel but this dinosaur wants to be able to put it into its proper context, thank you very much. And I want to be able to cite it in all the assorted ways in which I may need/want to do so.

Zotero

On the topic of Zotero, does it need a new format for ebooks? Sure, ebooks are just books. But—and this is highly preliminary as this is my 1st attempt at citing them—they need a field for URL to the book (if directly addressable as a download) and one for the provider. Those two requirements could possibly be served by the URL and Repository fields. But what about recording the format (.epub, .pdf. .mobi, …)? Anything else I’m missing?

Comments on the Works

The Lust Chronicles - This was hit and miss as one might expect of a book composed of disparate blog entries. But all in all, and for $4.99, I enjoyed it. There’s something to be said for discreetly reading erotica on one’s ebook device while riding public transit.

“Bon-Bon” - I thought Poe’s short stories were supposed to be good. Maybe I just got the wrong one. Meh. Thankfully it was short.

Amores - I quite enjoyed this and immediately looked for a print copy. It does not seem to be in print anymore and the only used copy I found was an old library castoff for a stupid amount of money. But one can get Complete Poems (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) [1088 pages], which includes lots of extra material from Amazon for $16.47, or one can get The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence (Wordsworth Pub., 352 pages) for $7.99. I kind of want the 1st one but I do not enjoy reading from books that large.  I have requested a copy via ILL of the 1st and larger one to see if it is the one I want.

Poems - This one I am back and forth on. I enjoyed some of the early poems and some from the middle and then there was a long stretch before finding some more I liked. There are a lot of poems here, some fairly long. I liked it enough to try and find a decent collection of her poems in print.

This exercise led to failures with library metadata; specifically, uniform titles in WorldCat. Telling me that there are 134 editions available but making it hard to narrow down which edition my librar(ies) hold is not a service. It is a disservice. I don’t want just any edition. But then, perhaps, I am a dinosaur. That, and library metadata issues, are topics for different posts.

Conclusion

I will keep reading some ebooks and PDFs on my Touch. In fact, I downloaded several more titles the other night. I already had the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So I grabbed Emerson’s Essays, Wells’ Tales of Time and Space and The Time Machine, Wagner’s The Simple Life, and one or two others.

Hopefully some of the issues I complain about above will work themselves out. My concern is whether they will be solved or whether I (and others) will simply adjust to this brave new world. Either way works, I guess. But I fear the second leads to the loss of something meaningful.

Back on 29 January 2005 …the thoughts are broken… debuted. That link now goes to the 1st post of this blog since I migrated to WordPress in July 2006.

Wow! Four years already. I haven’t been doing much here since about the middle of last year and I’d like to get back to it. But. I have more important things (to me) going on in my life nowadays.

#1 is the love of my life. She found me in an alley and my life will never be the same. Thankfully.

Other things keeping me quiet: my job, complexity of the issues in my area, issues of communication, lots of reading, reading & writing poetry, trying to learn more broadly from others, and other things.

I am still participating in the larger conversation, though, just not so much here. I am reading and commenting on blogs and am fairly active in FriendFeed.

Another thing keeping me rather quiet and introspective is the major birthday I have coming up in a few weeks. But that is only (somewhat) responsible for the current quietude.

According to Walt, my blog had 47% less posts in 2008 vs. 2007, and -12% words per post. If those time slices had been a quarter or two later in the year then the decrease would be far more dramatics. Oh well. The issues have been touched on a couple times in the few posts I’ve made since August or so.

No idea what the future holds for this blog, or for me. But for the 1st time in a long time I have serious hopes for, and am actually actively looking forward to, the latter. And that is the biggest thing keeping me quiet here. And I am perfectly OK with that.

I would like to say “Thank you!” to those still around and reading and to those all over the past 4 years who have read, commented, encouraged and challenged me. Thank you!

(Personal) Change

Some say that the zebra cannot change his stripes.
Some say that everything is change.
Some say “But, Baby, I’m willing to change ….”

The best change is not that which one thinks is impossible,
Nor that which is inevitable.
It is not even that which one desires.

The best change is that which you notice in hindsight.
In the presence of someone else you were allowed to be.
Different. Better.

It took no work; required no thought.
It was natural.
The change just was.

You know that this is how you were meant to be,
But knew not how to be this;
Nonetheless, you look back and find your being changed.

This is the best kind of change.

For assorted reasons my book reading greatly increased this past year. Based on that I split this list into two, posting the 1st half (or so) on 11 August in a post titled Books read in 1st half of 2008 (and some).

In the earlier post, I reported reading 26 books and re-reading 3 books. This list includes 45 books read, one re-read (also in the 45), and 4 unfinished. I think there are 2 in the read count that weren’t technically finished but close enough. The four unfinished are: Williams, et al.; Black; Crawford; and Berry. All but the Williams, et al. are currently being read.

Thus, totals for the year are:

• 71 books read
• 4 books re-read
• 4 books unfinished

Books Read in 2007 [33 books read, 3 of which were re-reads, and 9 books in progress]

Wow! This is a big increase. Not as big in magnitude as 2006 to 2007, but bigger in raw numbers by far.

As to why I censored myself please see this post or this one which contains the real explanation.

The rest of 2008s book reading follows: [those not in 1st post]

Not sure where this blog is going this year. I said some things last year about where I wanted to take it / thought it might go and it got nowhere near any of those places.

I read through all of my posts for 2008 on the 1st and 2nd. Wow! What a year! Talk about ups and downs. The reading went much quicker for the back half of the year seeing as I had but a handful of posts over the last quarter of the year.

I did and still do have some things to say. But for many reasons I chose/choose not to and/or am unable to do so—both good things and not so good things.

Things are really good in my life in some ways as I enter a new year and rapidly reach the half century mark. But I don’t get to say much about those.

I am in love and have the love of an amazingly wonderful woman. ‘Nuff said.

Some things are not so good; but really no worse than for many.

I have a job. For several more months anyway. But better than some, I knew from the start that it would end [on 15 August 2009]. At the time I got it there was a very good chance that it could be extended. With the economy tanked that is highly unlikely, though. So now I truly am on the job market—with many others—in an extremely poor economy.

It was a year of growth—some painful, some pleasant—and recognition of some areas which need improvement. In some cases I have a good idea and plan for how to work on those areas. Some are still too amorphously vague to have a plan; but awareness—or working towards awareness, at least—is the first step.

I have been working on a long post on the books I read this past year and WordPress is giving me fits. Apoplectic fits. Not sure if/when it will get posted anymore. The formatting keeps changing as WP sees fit from moment-to-moment. As soon as I figure out how to work around what it is doing it does something else. And now it is pulling out assorted COinS data. It is all becoming too much. [Hopefully it will be following on the heels of this one. ::fingers crossed::]

Also, one of the things I came across in re-reading my blog posts was my comments on censoring myself in my post “Some things read this week feature is over.” Now, none of those reasons have gone away although I was managing to ignore them as I constructed my Books Read in 2008 post. This morning [Saturday], in a different context, I was reminded that perhaps I am putting too much out there. So now I have to decide what to do with that post on top of trying to fight with WP.

I have no idea what this year will bring. I do have some hopes and desires but it is also a time of great change for S and for me.

I sincerely hope that I can continue to be the man I want to be in this relationship and that I can continue growing as that man.

I hope that I can be better at some things than I was in the past year. There were several issues that I wanted to comment on and had told others that I would that I never got to. Finding a way to discuss these issues in a more positive way is a big desire of mine. Finding a way to discuss them in a way I feel “safe” doing so is a hope.

I hope that I will be better at working on my breathing and perhaps find a way into yoga and other forms of exercise. I also hope I take up running again as soon as spring allows.

I hope to have a job after 15 August. And that it be interesting, challenging and with good people in a nice setting (work and non-work) is a desire.

Staying in better touch with assorted, but specific, people is a hope. Toward that end I am now in FriendFeed as it allows for a different kind of conversation than blogs or facebook. That, of course, is not enough and I must truly work harder at this.

I have many other hopes and desires for the new year. Some are concrete and some are still pretty abstract.

Besides hoping that everyone can be the person they desire to be in this year, my biggest hope and desire is that I actively and continuously work at being/becoming the person I want to be.

Again, I watched a lot of movies this year (98). Most of those early in the year were rented from the awesome and local That’s Rentertainment and watched alone. Later in the year I had someone who appreciates movies as much as, perhaps more than, me to watch them with.

We got movies from the Urbana Free Library, watched some at the UFL, netflix, netflix-on-demand, That’s Rentertainment, and even saw one at the Harvest Moon Drive-in. We also saw several in assorted theaters, including a couple at Ebertfest.

March was the high with 17 movies watched, while August and October tied for the low with only 2 each.

I wish I had more to say about some of these highly varied movies. Some were awful [Wanted, Sleuth '#2'], some were corny [Balls of Fury], many were not in English, some were serious, and some were great. I’ll leave it to you to discover those on your own, though, as our tastes probably are not the same.

Movies watched in 2007

Movies watched in 2006

January 2008

Live Free or Die Hard
3:10 to Yuma
The Namesake
Pizza
The Simpsons Movie
Helvetica - enjoyable documentary
la Vie en Rose - did not like sequencing, and songs not translated
Balls of Fury - ping pong kung fu (if you like wackiness, what’s not to like?)
Once

February 2008

Blame it on Fidel!
War
Year of the Dog
Opal Dream
The Brave One
Film geek
Buffalo ‘66
Acts of Worship
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (at Karen and Adam’s)

March 2008

Iris
A Beautiful Mind
30 Days of Night
Romance & Cigarettes
Across the Universe - not so impressed
Eastern Promises
Eagle vs. Shark
Eye of the Dolphin
Things that hang from trees
Night Watch
Agnes .. und seiner bruder / Agnes and his brothers
The Last Legion
The Hottest State
The Memory of a Killer
Alles for Zucker / Go for Zucker
The Kite Runner
Ani - Live at Babeville (Ani DiFranco)

April 2008

No Country for Old Men
Lust, Caution
Vitus
Beijing Bicycle
Walk Hard: Dewey Cox Story
Housekeeping (Ebertfest)
The Cell (Ebertfest)

May 2008

Savages
Romulus, My Father
Dead Fish
He was a quiet man
Yes
Juno (at Jeremy’s in TX)
Tristan + Isolde (at Jer’s)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull (theater in Killeen, TX)

June 2008

Delirious
The Visitor (at the Art theater)
Inside Deep Throat
Iron Man (at theater in Savoy)
Bedazzled
i want someone to eat cheese with
The Fall (Art theater) [again on 13 Jul]
We Were Soldiers

July 2008

Wanted (Savoy theater with S for free - thanks to IFO)
Hancock (at Harvest Moon Drive-in)
A Simple Curve (at Urbana Free)
As you Like It [2006]
Anything Else
Firefly - 1st episode
The Bothersome Man (Norwegian / at UFL)

August 2008

Secretary
Vicky Christina Barcelona (at Savoy? theater)

September 2008

The Ultimate Lesbian Short Film Festival
8 1/2 (at Krannert Art Museum) - this had a profoundly negative effect on me
Boarding Gate
Totally Baked
Room 314
Belle de Jour (at Popp’s French Night)
American Ramadan (at UFL)
The City of Lost Children
Charlie Bartlett
Watching You (lesbian shorts)

October 2008

Blue Gate Crossing
The Boss of It All (Danish from UFL)

November 2008

My Man Godfrey
Singin’ in the Rain (Krannert Art Museum)
Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. [1966]
Smart People
Happy-go-lucky (at Boardman’s Art Theater)
Paris, je t’aime (Netflix on demand)

December 2008

In Bruges
Twilight (at Beverly Theater, Savoy)
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
The Golden Compass
Rashomon
Vantage Point
Holiday [1938]
Enchanted
Angel-A
Slumdog Millionaire (at Boardman’s Art)
Sleuth [1972 Olivier & Caine]
Sleuth [2007 Caine & Jude Law]
The Notorious Bettie Page

I’ll be ending the year by watching When Harry Met Sally. I imagine that I saw it years ago but I’m not sure. So I didn’t include it in the totals.

la Vie en Rose just bothered me. The lead actress did a remarkable job but the highly fragmented storytelling simply got in the way of the story. That kind of jumping around can make sense in some genres and with some stories but I feel that it was inappropriate in this one. As I watch an awful lot of foreign films I am used to songs not being translated (that is, not having any closed captioning), but in a movie where the songs are as much, or more, of the story that is simply inexcusable, in my not so humble opinion. This movie had so much potential but it really and truly let me down.

Sleuth x2 Why do people think they have to remake movies? Why do they think they can do it better? S wanted to watch these back-to-back so we did. The first one with Sir Olivier & Michael Caine was pretty good all-in-all. Not a great movie but it made sense, the story was well written and presented, the acting was incredible (only 2 people ever appear in the movie) and it was entertaining. The screenplay was written by the original playwright.

The new one had a screenplay written by Harold Pinter. Caine played the opposite role (that of Olivier) from that which he played in the first. Thankfully, this one was much shorter. The story was practically incoherent and I doubt if I could have properly understood the storyline without having seen the first one. Caine was his usual better than average self, if not great. But then no one could have been great in this useless remake. And Jude Law. Well, I’ll be nice and simply say that he is no Olivier or Caine.

Have also been watching some of the 1st season of The Outer Limits via netflix-on-demand.

Not sure exactly what 2009 will bring on the movie viewing front but I know it holds some surprises. I should be able to easily view all of the Serenity series. I imagine there will be more things via netflix and netflix-on-demand. And I still have 29 prepaid rentals at That’s Rentertainment.

But the biggest ball of happiness and surprise is bound to come thanks to S and me having passes for Ebertfest 2009. Schedule to be announced in March. Woohoo!